It’s about three years since coronavirus, COVID-19, hit the world unannounced, closing all borders and keeping every citizen on lockdown.
Now, there seems to be a resurgence of new variant cases in China, affecting about 37 million people.
According to Bloomberg, health workers and medical bodies in Nigeria have now expressed worry about the federal government’s refusal to place travel restrictions on inbound passengers from China in the country.
According to them, Nigeria does not have adequate human resources to handle another pandemic as a result of the massive emigration of health workers to other countries.
Speaking on this critical issue, public health consultant Dr. Tuyi Mebawondu, says this is the fourth year, and we have seen as much as 668,000,000 cases of COVID-19, 6.7 million deaths, and we’ve deployed as much as 13 billion vaccines.
About 801 of those vaccines, million of those vaccines in Africa that year just did about 80% of that number.
He noted that the WHO expressed concern that we’re not getting truth from China as par of the number of cases of COVID-19, because the number they are declaring does not tally with the number of deaths they have seen, especially when they look at crematorium.
He added that there’s a new sub variant of Omicron, Alpha, Delta, Beta, and then we have Omicron.
Omicron has had some variants, which is, XPB 1.5, its a new sub variant which is responsible for as much as 40% of new infection in US. The sub variant is also in about 70 countries with average cases going as much as 500,000 worldwide which is a lot of concern.
The countries that are actually trending with this new sub variant, china, US, India, Singapore, and this UK. These are countries closely connected to Nigeria.
Mr Mebawondu stated that since the advent of COVID Nigeria has done less than 6 million testing in a country of 206,000,000.
He added that the fundamental issue is that as long as you have the COVID spreading, mutation will occur. If mutation is to stop, you must ensure the spread is curtailed.
Mr Mebawondu stated that the Omicron appears to be the most sustainable variance of the COVID-19 because it spread easily.
The new variant has both positive and negative aspect to it. The negative aspect is that it spread easily from one person to another and can infect as many people, 40% in America right now while the good aspect is that it’s causing less severe infection.
The public health consultant stated that geopolitics and pandemic diplomacy are affecting many things in the world by China not declaring the true numbers of things.
He mentioned that Donald Trump initially labeled the malware as a Chinese infection. It became a source of shame at a time when they needed to be restricted. People traveling from China to other countries.
Then on the political front, China is looking at it that if it now declares this clearly, it means that one, manufacturing is going to slow down, people will be worried. Two, my people are going to be subjected to special considerations. For instance, America has actually issued a warning that if you’re coming from China, you have to show certificate of negative COVID test.
He added that these are the kind of backlash they are trying to fight against.
According to him, there are a lot of COVID cover ups in this regard.
